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By Root 531 0

Berlin introduced ragtime to America, and got the country up and dancing in an era when the group dances of the nineteenth century were still in vogue. During World War I, Berlin told a simple truth that delighted both soldiers and their loved ones when he wrote “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.” In the jazz age, he presented some of the most artful versions of the musical revue in his own Music Box Theatre. Berlin conjured up an unsinkable answer to Old Man Depression in songs like “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee” from Face the Music, and evoked the suffering of black life in New York in “Supper Time.” In the thirties, he wrote the songs for Astaire-Rogers vehicles like Top Hat (“Cheek to Cheek” and “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”) and Carefree. In the years just before and during World War II, he wrote “God Bless America” and “White Christmas,” two of the most popular songs in American history. And then, after all that, still just shy of sixty, he wrote Annie Get Your Gun.

Has there ever been such a career in the history of popular entertainment? It is not Berlin’s longevity that is astounding, but rather his ability to capture the sound, and the mood, of one era after another. He seemed, at all moments and in all settings, to retain his magical access to the hearts of his listeners. There was something almost mythological about Berlin, the unlettered Jewish ragamuffin who could barely read music but who had songs pouring from his fingertips—like the Shakespeare who had little Latin and less Greek. A misty-eyed patriot and a self-made American, Berlin was Broadway’s chief entry in the national pantheon; as Alexander Woollcott observed as early as 1924, “The life of Irving Berlin is a part of the American epic.”

Annie Get Your Gun, like Kiss Me, Kate, is a Broadway show about show business. The show opens with the rousing anthem “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” in which strolling stagehands offer a rapturous tribute to the world Berlin had known and loved for half a century—the world that was, for him, the center of the universe. Annie Get Your Gun is a backstage musical about the rise of a Broadway star and her quest for the summum bonum of all musicals—love. Annie Oakley is torn between her desperate, doglike love for her fellow sharpshooter Frank Butler and her skills in a field where women are not supposed to excel. Thus her lament in “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun,” which, like so many great Berlin songs, is a complex mechanism built out of what feel like remarkably simple parts: “They don’t buy pajamas for pistol-packin’ Mommas, / For a man may be hot but he’s not when he’s shot. . . .”

Annie cannot bring herself to sacrifice one for the other. She celebrates her unquenchable competitive fires in “Anything You Can Do,” an exercise in the kind of western braggadocio made famous by Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce that somehow morphs into a meistersinger competition in which Annie—Ethel Merman, in the original cast—holds a note until she busts. “Anything You Can Do” is both a song about virtuosity and itself an astonishing display of virtuosity: the story goes that Berlin was asked to supply a new song for the two leads, and fifteen minutes later called the director, Josh Logan, and sang the entire first chorus. “Most amazing thing I ever experienced in my whole life,” Logan later said.

When Fred, the songwriting sensation of George S. Kaufman’s June Moon, is ludicrously praised as the next Irving Berlin, an otherwise cynical showgirl immediately demurs. “There’s something behind his songs,” she says of Berlin. “They’re sympathetic.” Berlin never lost sight of the fact— never had to be told, for that matter—that in popular entertainment, all the ingenuity in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t have the audience on your side. His songs were always sympathetic, even when they were busy doing something else. Annie Oakley wins us over by her artlessness and her ardor, and by the competitive fire that keeps getting in the way of her amorous designs. And she remains sympathetic even as she becomes